Meet Your Customers More than Halfway: Anticipate Their Circumstances of Use
(Part 3)
by Adele Sommers, Ph.D.

Imagining how our customers might want — or need — to use our products and services helps us create offerings that will help them succeed in many situations and circumstances.

In Part 1 of this series, we first considered the normal or routine conditions under which people might want to engage with what we offer. In Part 2, we discussed why we would want to anticipate how people might try to use our products or services in non-routine or even extreme situations, and the reasons for striving to make our offerings foolproof.

In Part 3 (this article), we’ll explore another aspect of meeting our customers more than halfway by screening their eligibility for what we have to offer.

Non-Routine Circumstances Revisited

Part 2 of this series examined some of the unusual conditions under which people might want to use our products and services, including in:

• Risky or incomplete states, such as during power fluctuations, using incorrect tools, with insufficient resources or training, or with a substandard infrastructure

• Stressful or isolated conditions, such as during bad weather, off-hours, or in remote locations, when it would be hard to address customer concerns or provide assistance if something failed

In sub-optimal circumstances, how would your offerings react? Ideally, your products or services would be able to complete the action flawlessly, or, almost as ideally, halt the action intelligently and harmlessly and let your customers know what to do next.

Are Your Customers Well-Suited to What You Offer?

By this time, you may be thinking that it’s nearly impossible to anticipate every condition your customers might experience. So, what else can you do?

One technique is to prescreen potential customers to determine how likely they are to succeed with your offerings. Using this approach, you don’t necessarily attempt to resolve all conceivable shortcomings, but rather reduce the risk of failure by ensuring that potential customers will meet minimum requirements. What criteria should you use to decide their suitability? Below are some examples of things to consider.

Example 1 - Real Estate

In the housing industry, pre-qualification is common. No matter how badly a person might want to purchase a home, if a potential borrower doesn’t fit the financial profile of a good borrowing risk, he or she won’t be able to get a loan — at least not without a high interest rate. In the U.S., lending institutions determine eligibility for a low interest rate using a scoring formula. The formula takes into account many aspects of a buyer’s consumer history, and thereby helps predict the buyer’s future success with sticking to a long-term payment plan.

Example 2 - Consulting Services

If you’re a service provider, coach, or consultant, you might use interviews, intake forms, or both to screen potential clients on the basis of factors such as:

• The nature of the client’s needs, and how well those needs align with your mission, purpose, and consulting expertise. If a potential client wants an end result that doesn’t fall within your professional purview, it represents a risk for both you and the client.

• The client’s level of motivation, which you can assess by asking what a person believes are his or her greatest strengths, challenges, and obstacles. Especially in the coaching arena, this type of screening helps identify people who are inclined to blame others or make endless excuses for their situations. Such people might not make very satisfying clients — regardless of how well their stated needs match your expertise.

Example 3 - Technological Fit

What if what you offer requires your customers or clients to have a certain type of technological infrastructure to be truly successful?

That infrastructure might involve high-end computing equipment, digital wiring, Internet connectivity, high bandwidth, proximity to a telecommunications transmitter, or other factors.

Many manufacturers specify minimum technical requirements for using their offerings. Their policies typically state which combinations of products and infrastructures they will and will not support. That way, their customers can prescreen themselves.

But if your offerings involve a more sophisticated sales process, what can you do? One of the first issues to resolve is what types of failures customers could encounter when they lack any part of the ideal infrastructure. Will they falter outright, limp along with intermittent success, or experience a problem only once in rare while?

Especially if the potential for severe or frequent problems is high, you could attempt to minimize the likelihood by doing one of the following:

• Bundle supplementary products or services with your primary offerings that are capable of bringing substandard customer situations up to par. Such upgrades might become a condition of sale for your primary products or services, and would enable you to directly set the conditions for success.

• Offer a complimentary advisory service that can walk potential customers through the steps they should take to upgrade their technical infrastructures. In these cases, you would not provide the upgrade products or services themselves, but would instead point people to where to get them. You are leaving more of the legwork and decision-making up to those people, hoping they’ll eventually become your qualified customers. So, you are indirectly influencing the conditions for success.

• Devise a screening program to filter out all but the best-qualified customers for what you offer. In this case, you’re not attempting directly or indirectly to improve the conditions for success. You are simply evaluating eligibility and choosing your customers accordingly.

In conclusion, consider that prescreening your customers can help you satisfy their needs more successfully. A prescreened customer is a better match for what you offer and thus tends to be happier. He or she welcomes repeat business with you; contacts customer service less often; spreads fewer (if any) complaints about you; and gives more glowing recommendations to family, friends, and colleagues.

To download the related checklist, click here.

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About the Author

Adele Sommers, Ph.D. is author of “Straight Talk on Boosting Business Performance: 12 Ways to Profit from Hidden Potential.” To learn more about her book and sign up for more free tips like these, visit her site at www.LearnShareProsper.com

This article may be distributed freely on your Web site, as long as this entire article, including the links and full “About the Author” section, are unchanged. Please send a copy of, or link to, your “reprint” to Adele@LearnShareProsper.com.

Copyright 2006 Adele Sommers, The Enterprise Prosperity Guild, All Rights Reserved.

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